10 Movie Costumes That Actors Hated Wearing

They couldn't wait to take them off.

batman and robin mr freeze
Warner Bros

Becoming an actor is the dream of many young people all over the world. With luxurious lifestyles, legions of fans, and more money than anyone could ever need, the life of a Hollywood star certainly seems an exciting proposition, but making movies isn't always as fun as it seems.

On screen, we only see the end result: a couple of hours of edited, enhanced footage cut together into a feature length motion picture. What we don't see is the long weeks of casting, the endless reshoots, the innumerable production problems, the difficult behind-the-scenes moments, and the desperately uncomfortable costumes.

Yes, one of many actors' biggest complaints involves the outfits they were forced to wear. They may look cool on screen, but slipping into tight spandex on a boiling hot day or sitting for hours while oodles of prosthetics and masses of makeup are applied to one's face definitely doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun.

Some of these parts turned out to be highly lucrative for the actors concerned, but each scene was made so much harder due to the cumbersome costumes they had to wear and these stars simply couldn't wait to tear them off at the end of each day.

10. Turtle Suits (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles)

batman and robin mr freeze
New Line Cinema

Developed by Jim Henson's Creature Shop, the turtle suits used in Steve Barron's 1990 film of the world's most fearsome fighting team were said to be literally painful to wear. Each suit was fitted with a bunch of animatronics, making them very difficult to get in and out of.

Not only that, but they were also incredibly heavy. The suit heads alone were said to have weighed around 30 pounds, and all those animatronic systems made the costumes particularly bulky. Each actor actually needed to be given their own specially-made wooden frame to rest on between takes, with fans being used to blow cold air onto their faces as they boiled up inside all that rubber and metal.

Leif Tilden, who played Donatello in the film and spent much of his career wearing big heavy outfits, compared the early days of filming to being in Vietnam. Actors would get ridiculously hot inside the suits, with all four losing a lot of weight over the course of production. Josh Pais, who played Raphael, even started to feel claustrophobic when the head of his suit went on and had a few breakdowns on set, yelling at the costume team to get the head off as quickly as they could.

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